Yikes.
Even the Defense Secretary is calling Mike Pompeo a fat liar for making up that story about how Soleimani was planning random attacks on US embassies for no reason.
It must be hard for Pompeo, being isolated to the point where other cabinet members are throwing him under the bus.
Reuters:
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Sunday said he did not see specific evidence from intelligence officials that Iran was planning to attack four U.S. embassies, an assertion made by President Donald Trump in justifying the killing of Iran’s top general.
While Esper said he agreed with Trump that additional attacks against U.S. embassies were likely, he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Trump’s remarks to Fox News were not based on specific evidence on an attack on four embassies.
“What the president said was that there probably could be additional attacks against embassies. I shared that view,” Esper said. “The president didn’t cite a specific piece of evidence.”
When pressed on whether intelligence officers offered concrete evidence on that point he said: “I didn’t see one with regards to four embassies.”
I hate to keep saying it, but the basic nature of reality is that anything is possible.
It was also possible that space aliens were planning an attack on US embassies.
We do not have any evidence that space aliens were or were not planning such attacks, just like we have no evidence that Soleimani was or was not planning such attacks.
That is to say: Donald Trump and his advisors had exactly the same amount of evidence that aliens were planning to attack US embassies as they had that Iran was planning to do that. I guess they chose to attack Iran instead of space aliens because they don’t know where the space aliens live or if they even exist.
Since confirming that Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani had been killed by a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, administration officials have claimed they acted because of an imminent risk of attacks on American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.
Democrats and a few Republicans in Congress have questioned the justification of the attacks and said they have not been given adequate, detailed briefings.
Trump said on Friday Iran probably had targeted the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and was aiming to attack four U.S. embassies before Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike on Jan. 3.
“We will tell you probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad,” Trump said in a clip of an interview on Fox News. “I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies.”
This is truly an incredible situation.
The Baghdad embassy was rioted against because the US bombed the country, because an Iraqi was killed on an Iraqi base that the US claims was attacked by an Iraqi militia which is a part of the Iraqi army (yes, they keep saying “Iranian-backed militia,” but Kata’ib Hezbollah is officially recognized by the Iraqi government and military as a legitimate military body).
What Trump is claiming is that the timing of the attack on the embassy – coming just after the US bombings, which killed 25 people – was either a coincidence or that the Iranians used it as a pretext to start a riot at the embassy.
However, there is no evidence of this. And the obvious assumption, when a riot at the US embassy comes immediately after a US bombing, is that people were rioting because they were angry about the bombing. It seems to be a direct cause and effect.
It had been over ten years since the US had bombed Iraqi military forces in Iraq, so I think it is relatively easy to look at the situation and say “it looks like people were angry about the US bombing, so they rioted at the US embassy.”
These people coming out and admitting they had no evidence for their claims is both bold and bizarre.
It seems like it would have made sense to just keep lying.